VILE ABUSE | 

Coercive control victim reveals garda Paul Moody left her stranded while heavily pregnant

“But after we had the disagreement Paul got up and walked away and left me on the beach, I couldn’t walk.”

Yesterday

Hairdresser Nicola thought she had landed the man of her dreams when she paired up with Garda Paul Moody as a match on Tinder.

Dubliner Nicola had yearned to get married, settle down and have a child.

Moody ticked all the right boxes — a decent job, relatively good looking and initially amicable.

But Nicola’s life soon turned to one of torment at the hands of one of Ireland’s worst coercive controllers.

During an outburst at the start of their relationship, Moody freaked out when he was told by one of Nicola’s friends that he obviously couldn’t have her all to himself and that he would have to ‘share’ her with them.

Despite being drunk, Moody drove Nicola’s car back to her apartment and let himself in.

“He smashed up the whole apartment. He got glass and smashed all the units, put all my medicine on the walls,” Nicola reveals.

“He destroyed everything; all the years of saving up to buy stuff for the apartment and stuff like that. Wooden floors he destroyed, scratched them with glass. I never had the money to replace these things.”

But there was worse to come.

“That was bad enough, but then he had sent photos, saying he was going to put them all over the internet, photographs that I was unaware that Paul had taken in my bathroom,” she adds.

“I had no window. Obviously being a hairdresser you like your hair to be perfect, and I left the door open so the steam wouldn’t ruin my hair.

“But from my bedroom as I was drying myself and stuff like that, he was obviously taking photographs of me unaware, not very nice photographs. I remember me and my sister just didn’t know what to do.”

Control freak Moody’s evil deeds will be unveiled for all to see when his brave victim speaks publicly for the first time on TV about her life of hell with the monster.

Courageous Nicola had to endure years of abuse at the hands of the fiend.

While battling stage four cancer she recalls one awful incident while she was pregnant with their son, which was a perfect example of his horrendous wickedness.

“I think I was eight months pregnant,” explains Nicola, who does not want to share her surname until a documentary on her life with Moody titled Taking Back Control is screened on RTÉ One tomorrow week.

“Me and Paul came to have a break from the house, I was sick a lot. We found a little spot on the beach, away from everybody and we were just lying there. We got into a discussion that we both didn’t agree on.”

Nicola had told Moody she wasn’t feeling well at the time because she was on medication.

“Paul would know that a lot of the time it would affect my legs and my ability to walk. I’d always have to be in a safe place, so I wouldn’t fall, especially with the baby inside me,” she continues.

“But after we had the disagreement Paul got up and walked away and left me on the beach, I couldn’t walk.

“I waited and waited on the beach thinking he might come back but he didn’t. I could see him in the distance sitting on the bonnet of my car watching me crawl. And Paul would do these things.

“I think you’d be in shock to think ‘how could somebody be so cruel’ but that’s Paul.”

Friends of Nicola’s reveal how he tried to use his job as an officer at Irishtown Garda Station to try to sneakily glean information about Nicola when he started dating her.

Pal Niamh Paget already knew Moody, as they had a mutual friend and would meet up at Christmas parties and summer barbeques.

She got texts on Messenger from him asking whether Niamh was “bogey” and lied that a colleague of his was investigating her for Revenue fraud.

“I got such a shock and thought ‘this is the last thing she needs’,” recalls Niamh.

“I didn’t honestly think it was a joke or for one second he was lying. I said ‘Paul, there’s no way Nicola would have anything to do with fraud, she was actually diagnosed with cancer two years ago and she’s in recovery’.

“Little did I know, that less than 24 hours before he had met Nicola on Tinder. He screenshot the messages from me and sent them on to Nicola and said to Nicola ‘your friend has just ratted you out, that you’ve had cancer’.”

That was just a taster of what was to come as Moody tried to manipulate not only Nicola but also try to turn her close group of friends against her.

Nicola and her pals also remember his menacing text messages — on one day alone he bombarded her with more than 600 texts.

“Honestly, you’re better off getting cancer again, or killing the child, cause sweetheart!! What you’ve started I’m gonna f**kin finish,” he ranted.

“And the baby, just remember if you make it nine months and die, I take her,” Moody’s text messages said.

Nicola was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, having initially found a lump on one of her breasts. Doctors told her it had spread to several other parts of her body.

A Go Fund Me campaign was set up for her, with Christy Dignam playing a charity concert to raise funds to send her to Thailand, where she was given successful treatment.

“Five months into the pregnancy and I found a lump. I actually couldn’t believe it. So now I was petrified, I knew when I felt the lump ‘its back’, but now I thought ‘Now I’m worried about my baby inside me, what’s cancer going to do to my baby’,” weeps Nicola.

She only rekindled her relationship with Moody after she discovered she was pregnant with their child, and as her dream was always to have a family unit she put up with his behaviour for the sake of their unborn son.

On the way to the hospital to give birth Moody tried to take the key from the ignition while Nicola was driving, and then when she threw him out of the car, he deliberately took the baby bag she had prepared for the upcoming arrival of their child.

She also had to get him removed from the labour ward after he unleashed another torrent of vile abuse.

When their son arrived, Nicola told him she did not want him having any part in their lives, and he then tried to destroy her life by trying to get dirt on one of her family members.

When Moody handed over his phone to a garda colleague who was investigating alleged evidence against an individual, officers discovered a horrific ‘treasure trove’ of coercive control Moody had waged against Nicola and her pals.

They approached Nicola to ask if she would give evidence, and she decided she would finally take him down after years of hell. In July last year, Moody was jailed for three years and three months for his coercive control crimes.

“When you meet somebody and there’s red flags, you choose to ignore them because you see the good in the person,” reflects Nicola.

“Them red flags are everything and more as to why you’re going to have to leave this person.

“An argument is OK. We all argue about who is going to have to empty the dishwasher, who’s going to have to put the bins out.

“But there’s a difference of somebody’s tone and how they even speak to you, with such disrespect. If somebody even looks angry at you when they’re speaking to you, as if they want to hurt you, it’s not healthy.”

• Taking Back Control is on Monday, December 11 at 9:35pm on RTÉ One.